EW have spoken to Fantastic Beasts producer David Heyman about the public’s outcry due to lack of diversity amongst the cast.
The criticism is ironic because Fantastic Beasts is actually a story about acceptance (an anti-bigotry message that also recurred in the Potter books and films). Without giving anything away, the members of the wizarding world are outcasts in 1926 New York and subject to discriminatory persecution.
Here’s what he had to say:
“Like all of Jo Rowling’s works, [Fantastic Beasts] is populated with a variety of people and that will be the same in this series over the course of the films,” Heyman says. “There will be people of various types of ethnicities. In New York in the 1920s, there was a segregation between white and black, the neighborhoods were largely separate, and that is reflected in [the film]. But the wizarding world is a much more open and tolerant society where people of color and different ethnic backgrounds exist harmoniously together. There are people of color filling this world in an organic way.”
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